Flight 7 Is Missing Read online

  The tall, blue-eyed and handsome forty-one-year-old Lamaison is the perfect spokesman for his company. He won numerous meritorious awards for his daring aerial exploits with the Free French Air Force in World War II and was a star rugby player while growing up in France. The Lamaisons make their home on prestigious Park Avenue in New York City. Today, he and his wife, a part-time model, are setting off on a well-deserved vacation to Honolulu. Their three children are being taken care of by relatives, and the Lamaisons are looking forward to a relaxing week on the islands after the executive makes a final decision on a Hawaiian distributor for Renault. They are seated in Seats 9C and 9D.

  Louisville community activist and Cumberland College trustee Norma Jeanne Perkins Hagan and her surgeon husband, Dr. William H. Hagan, are directed to first-class Seats 11A and 11B. Mrs. Hagan, the daughter of a well-to-do coal mining executive, takes the window seat as Dr. Hagan settles into a wide, comfortable reclining aisle seat that Pan Am says resembles a “soft, flying, foam rubber cloud.” No one is behind them; they are seated in front of the plane’s entrance and near the winding stairs leading to the below-deck cocktail lounge.

  Dr. Hagan, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard Medical School graduate, plans to attend the Pan-Pacific Surgical Association conference in Honolulu. He is the medical partner and son of Dr. Harbert Hart Hagan, one of Louisville’s leading surgeons, and he already has established himself as a respected medical professional. The Hagans, who live in a large two-story colonial home in an exclusive area of Louisville, are one of the city’s most promising young couples. They have left their ten-year-old son, William Jr., in the care of relatives.

  The plane is quickly filling with passengers. In less than twenty minutes they will be airborne.

  Waiting anxiously to learn whether they will be able to board the flight today are eighteen-year-old college freshman Sandy Nelson and her twelve-year-old brother, Bobby, of nearby Menlo Park. Their father, Bob Sr., has been a Pan Am employee since the end of World War II, and he and his wife, Edna, a kindergarten teacher at James Flood Elementary, have decided that it’s time for their children to see a bit of the world beyond the mainland of the United States.

  Bobby and Sandy’s parents have taken the children out of school for a two-week vacation to Hawaii, and the family is on the standby list to Honolulu. Their chances of getting on this flight are not very good because it is nearly full, but just a few minutes before the scheduled departure time a gate agent tells them that a couple whose car has broken down on one of the bridges into San Francisco may not make it to the airport in time and that those seats might be available. The family decides that if only two seats become open, the children will travel on to Honolulu and the parents will catch up with them on the next flight out. Bobby is especially excited because his father knows Captain Brown, and the youngster has been promised a visit to the cockpit once the airliner is in the sky and everyone has settled in.

  Minutes later the agent gives Bobby and Sandy their tickets and they excitedly walk through the open wooden concourse toward the waiting Stratocruiser, waving to their parents as they leave. Just as they are about to board, the late-arriving couple come running into the gate area, and the Nelson siblings are bumped from the flight.

  As fate will have it, they will not be flying to Honolulu today on Romance of the Skies.

  11:20 a.m.

  Flight engineer Pinataro completes his prestart checklist and gives the “Ready to Start Engines” report to Captain Brown, who has been running through dozens of items of his own that must be checked off before starting the big air-cooled engines. Starting the four powerful Pratt & Whitney Wasp R-4360 engines requires the full attention of Flight 7’s flight crew; Stratocruiser engines need constant attention. If the crew doesn’t follow the prescribed starting procedure exactly, there is a very real possibility that all fifty-six spark plugs will be fouled and the flight will be delayed, something that Pan Am considers unacceptable.

  At 11:25 a.m. lead ramp crewman Coraino Carvahalo closes and secures the forward cargo door and Daniel Hernandez signals Captain Brown to start engine three. It thunders to power and comes alive with the expected flume of belching, oily smoke, and engines four, two, and one follow. The pretaxi checklist is read aloud and Flight 7 is ready to leave on the first leg of its around-the-world flight.

  “Pan American 7, this is San Francisco Tower. You are cleared to taxi to runway two-eight right”

  “Roger, San Francisco Tower. This is Pan American 7 acknowledging taxi to runway two-eight right.”

  Just as the plane begins to pull away from the terminal, a cargo representative excitedly runs onto the tarmac and notifies the ground coordinator that Flight 7 is thirty-two kilos overweight in the forward compartment. Captain Brown is immediately notified, and to save time, only the number three engine is shut down. Cargo crewmen rush to the plane, put the wheel chocks back in place, open the forward cargo door, and hastily remove company mail from the cargo compartment. Just as they are about to close the cargo door again, an alert coworker notices that the thirty-two kilos of company mail had not been included in the cargo weight in the first place, so they reenter the cabin, remove some more cargo, and close the door.

  Captain Brown restarts engine three, but this has been a bit unusual. The morning already has been anything but routine, for three reasons: 1) the rare stopping of the engine to remove cargo because the plane is overweight; 2) the heavy IBM machine in the forward hatch; and 3) cargo being loaded into an upstairs, unused cabin area, something that seldom occurs.

  At 11:35 a.m. Captain Brown eases the giant airliner away from the terminal and scans out the broad cockpit windows for any obstructions on the ground. The late-morning fog dances off the aluminum fuselage, portions of which reflect the sun that occasionally reveals itself from behind the clouds.

  For a moment, it looks as if Romance of the Skies is on fire.

  In a fenced-in observation area near the departure gate, two little boys wave wildly at the departing plane. One of them, in a straw cowboy hat shouts excitedly.

  “Bye-bye, Daddy! Come back soon! We’ll go fishing, OK?”

  The younger boy, his brown hair peeking out from around the corners of his Davy Crockett cap, waves both hands in the air and blows kisses at the departing plane.

  “We’ll be waiting for you, Daddy! Hurry home!”

  The children’s mother holds a curly-haired toddler tightly in her arms, but he takes a cue from his older brothers and gets into the act, too, waving and shouting for Daddy to come home soon.

  My mother pulls my little brother closer for warmth. She feels an icy cold chill that sends ripples of nervous waves from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. Blaming it on the cool, foggy San Francisco morning, she tries to shrug it off.

  Still, something is bothering her. Something she can’t explain.

  “San Francisco Ground Control, Clipper Nine-Four-Four, taxi clearance, please. IFR to Honolulu.”

  “Clipper Nine-Four-Four cleared to Runway Two-Eight Right via the south taxiway and Runway One Right. Wind calm.”

  A few minutes later the flight crew is given clearance to cross Runway 28 Right and is told to taxi into position and hold. Captain Brown receives the “all-secure” report from the cabin crew, noting that all passengers’ seatbelts are fastened and the cabin is secure. He sets the parking brake, then runs through a list of pretakeoff engine checks.

  The tower then radios Flight 7 its takeoff instructions.

  “ATC clears Clipper Nine-Four-Four to the Rainbow Intersection. Climb northwest bound on northwest course of the low frequency range via the San Francisco Gap, direct Pedro. Maintain four thousand, Balboa direct Rainbow. Maintain altitude for a left turn at the Gap, one thousand five hundred feet, and contact departure control 120.5 immediately after takeoff.”

  This is the normal departure route for the San Francisco-to-Honolulu route, and Captain Brown repeats the instructions.

  “Tower, Nine-Four-F
our is ready for takeoff.”

  At 11:51 a.m., Captain Brown looks down the runway from the eighteen-window flight deck, positions Romance of the Skies on the white center line, releases the parking brake, and pushes the four throttles to 2400 RPM as the giant, somewhat ungainly airliner roars down the runway toward the green threshold lights. Brown pulls back on the stick, and the plane slowly lifts into the California sky.

  “Clipper Nine-Four-Four, off at fifty-one, climbing.”

  Moments later Captain Brown orders the landing gear to be retracted, the flaps are raised, and Flight 7 is on its way. He then gently applies the brakes to slow the wheels that are still rotating from takeoff.

  Romance of the Skies heads northwest for the routine ten-hour flight to Honolulu, and passes over south San Francisco, San Bruno, and Daly City. The Golden Gate Bridge quickly fades away below the right-side cockpit windows, and in less than three minutes there is no land in sight. It climbs to 4,000 feet and Captain Brown requests, and is granted, clearance to climb to the cruising altitude of 10,000 feet.

  Captain Brown, like the rest of the Flight 7 crew, knows the cockpit of this plane like the back of his hand. He has logged more than 12,000 hours of flying time, including 756 hours in Stratocruisers like this one, and is filling in for a sick colleague today. The son of a Boston investment banker, Brown joined Pan Am after earning his bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University in Boston. He and his family have been in the United States only since last December, when they moved to nearby Palo Alto from Germany, from where he had piloted Pan Am aircraft throughout Europe. He has five children: Edward, nineteen; Aminta, eighteen; Cynthia, eight; Gordon Jr., five; and Nancy, two.

  A calm, confident man known by his colleagues as a “pilot’s pilot,” Brown stands nearly six feet tall and is certified to fly not only the Strats, but also DC-3s, DC-4s, and Convair 240s. Within the previous three months he has taken refresher training courses in all aspects of flying Stratocruisers, including wet ditching drills, something that has had even more meaning to aircraft crew members in the past year.

  The forty-year-old Brown has had eleven days off before today’s flight and is well rested for what is expected to be a routine run.

  Second in command today is the very capable William Purdy Wygant of Redwood City, a veteran World War II Navy pilot who participated in the bombing of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Oregon native was a premed student at the University of Oregon when he enlisted in the Navy Air Corps just a few weeks before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The thirty-seven-year-old Wygant has been with Pan Am for eleven years and has logged more than 4,000 hours in Stratocruisers, including Romance of the Skies. He has three children from a previous marriage to the former Berneice Erickson: William, seven; Bette Anne, four; and Brenna, two.

  Wygant plans to meet his current wife, twenty-seven-year-old Pan Am stewardess Betty Sue, for a fifteen-minute reunion when their flights cross paths at the Honolulu airport later this evening.

  Flight 7’s navigator, radio operator, and relief pilot is my father, William H. Fortenberry, who has more than 2,680 commercial flight hours, more than half of those in Stratocruisers. Like Captain Brown and first officer Wygant, he has completed all regular and special courses, including those on emergencies and ditching. All his certificates and ratings are current.

  Romance of the Skies is a giant maze of metal and sophisticated electronics equipment. A flying Boeing-built marvel, she has been in continuous use since her purchase by Pan American in 1949. A descendant of the World War II B-29 Stratofortress bomber, she is one of fifty-five Boeing Stratocruisers and is considered the most advanced airliner ever made. It is a mammoth airplane, thirty-eight feet tall with a wingspan of 141 feet and a length of 110 feet. It is the first “jumbo” commercial aircraft ever built, and although it is often referred to as “Tomorrow’s Aircraft Today” its days are numbered.

  Mechanically, its electrical generating capacity is sufficient to operate all the appliances and lights in fifty eight-room houses. Boeing boasts that creating and building the Stratocruiser required nine acres of blueprints and three years of the most advanced engineering, fabrication, construction, and testing of any aircraft to date, including 5 million hours of design and development, before the aircraft was put into commercial use.

  Stratocruisers can fly farther, faster, and more comfortably than any other passenger plane built, and they are luxuriously equipped with wide aisles and cushy and comfortable seats, and each has a cocktail lounge that is reached by descending a winding staircase to the airplane’s belly. The lounge includes leather and rich fabric seating for fourteen, a snack bar, five sightseeing windows, hot- and cold-running water, and an ice compartment.

  Stratocruisers are considered the aviation wonder of the age, and passengers love them. They are roomy enough for passengers to stroll about in the main cabin, and Boeing claims the “flying hotels” offer the “smoothest ride in the sky.”

  They are also notoriously unreliable, especially among pilots, despite claims by Boeing and Pan American that they “offer the ultimate in both comfort and safety.”

  Some pilots joke that Stratocruisers are the “best three-engine airplanes ever built.”

  Romance of the Skies is no stranger to the news. On January 20, 1956, the plane was on the same route as it is today—San Francisco to Honolulu—when pilot Captain Henry C. Kristofferson (father of music and film star Kris) was informed that a passenger, Lelia Henderson of Asheville, North Carolina, was about to give birth, 400 miles out in the Pacific. The baby had not been expected for another two months, and Marine Sergeant Robert Henderson and his wife had no clue that it was to be premature. The Hendersons and their small daughter, Patricia Ann, had left their home a few days earlier en route to his new duty station in Hawaii.

  Flying at an altitude of 12,000 feet, Captain Kristofferson immediately turned the giant airliner around and raced the stork back to San Francisco. Baby Henderson, however, did not wait for the Stratocruiser to land and was delivered at 3:04 a.m. with the assistance of Honolulu-bound passenger Frances Norton, who used fingernail scissors and sterilized tape in the delivery. When the plane landed in San Francisco the Hendersons and their new baby, wrapped in a Pan Am-blue blanket, were met by Dr. Frederick Leeds, an airline physician, who pronounced that mother and baby were in fine shape. Shortly thereafter the plane left again for Honolulu, and the onboard birth made headlines around the world.

  Romance of the Skies made news again about a month later when the airplane developed engine trouble about halfway between San Francisco and Honolulu and was forced to return to California. That may have been a sign of what was to come.

  Pilots often say they would rather fly a Stratocruiser through a thunderstorm than any other plane, and they love its spacious cockpit with its numerous, abnormally large windows.

  Because thirty-six passengers are on board today and because there is so much mail headed for Honolulu, the front right portion of the cabin has been transformed into a cargo area. At liftoff, Romance weighs 197,000 pounds, the maximum allowed by safety officials. It has enough fuel to stay aloft for thirteen hours.

  As soon as Daddy’s plane is out of sight, my mother piles us into our 1955 two-tone blue Ford and heads back home to Santa Clara, a forty-minute drive south of the airport.

  “Where’s Daddy going this time, Mama?” Jerry asks.

  “Honolulu.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You know. Where they have beautiful beaches and flowers . . . ”

  “And hula dancers,” I inform him.

  “That’s right, honey.”

  “Will he be home for Thanksgiving?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  “Will we have a turkey?”

  “The biggest, juiciest turkey you ever saw.”

  “And pumpkin pie, too, Mama?”

  “And pumpkin pie, too. Your daddy loves pumpkin pie.”

  My mother drives south on US 101, past the Moffett Field N
aval Air Station on her left, with its huge Navy blimp hangar towering nearly 200 feet in the sky. A Navy Constellation—very similar to airplanes Daddy has flown in the past—takes off just ahead of us, and Mom shudders again with that unexplained chill.

  “Maybe I’m coming down with the flu. Wouldn’t that be great? Bill on a trip and me sick with three boys to take care of,” she says to herself.

  She tunes the radio dial into a Palo Alto station and listens to The Duprees sing about a lonely heart:

  “Fly the ocean in a silver plane

  Watch the jungle when it’s wet with rain

  Just remember ’til you’re home again

  You belong to me.”

  The cold, the chill again.

  Something is bothering her, and it is getting worse by the minute. If only she knew what it is.

  Meanwhile, Flight 7 of the “World’s Most Experienced Airline” heads out over the Pacific.

  Twenty minutes after takeoff, Flight 7 is at its planned cruising speed of 226 knots, and its passengers are settled in for the ten-hour flight. Stewardesses McGrath and Alexander begin serving a light lunch and pouring freshly brewed coffee from a five-gallon urn in the huge and well-equipped galley in the rear of the plane.

  After lunch, the soft, steady hum of the plane’s engines provides a soothing background noise as some passengers drift off to an early-afternoon nap. Others chat with their seatmates, play card games, and flip through the latest edition of Clipper Travel, Pan Am’s colorful highbrow travel magazine. The front cover features a photo of a young couple riding bicycles near Mont St. Michel, an island off the northwest shore of France. Inside are feature stories, Hollywood gossip, and advertisements for expensive wines and liquors. One ad encourages passengers to ask the Pan Am crew for anything they may need to make their flight more comfortable, including complimentary Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Pan Am encourages smoking “to your heart’s content” while on board. Other ads promote everything from “Kitten-Soft” pure-cashmere sweaters and cardigans from Swan & Edgar of London to promotions for some of the most famous restaurants and nightclubs in the world.